


not to be reduced by them

by ERNest



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Causality, Character Study, Family legacy, Gen, Prophecy, Witches, signs are interpretable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-19 07:14:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20653253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: Sifting through her memories like that would be like examining a map of unknown bounds only by looking through a very long, very narrow tube, and then translating the kind of person she was back then into the kind she is today.“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter





	not to be reduced by them

If you asked her, Anathema couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment she found herself interested in the Nice and Accurate Prophecies because they are interesting and not just because all her life her family has been telling her that her family exists for her to be interested in deciphering the prophecies. Maybe there wasn’t a single moment, and she wouldn’t have identified that shift when she was in the moment anyway.

Sifting through her memories like that would be like examining a map of unknown bounds only by looking through a very long, very narrow tube, and then translating the kind of person she was back then into the kind she is today. Put like that she suddenly has a lot more sympathy for her great-great-great-great-great grandmother. At least she only needs to think about what’s changed in the past nineteen years instead of gazing forward into a mess of centuries and the changing language and tradition that entails.

And probably the moment of true interest began with something like this, with the understanding that Agnes was a person, a woman like her, who wrote down pieces of time as she saw them. _She_ wasn’t a task master, it’s all of Anathema’s other ancestors who decided this book was a directive and not a guide. It’s less of an exhausting prospect, to tease out the answers of what this four-hundred year old witch could have been thinking, without the expectation of a pop quiz at any moment.

Anathema does not know it, but she is as close to _being_ Agnes as genetic drift will allow. It means she’s better at deciphering these scraps of scrying than anyone who’s come before her. It also means that she can easily pick up on the disciplines of occultism when she decides to do so, and that auras reveal themselves to her once she teaches herself how to look.

Also like Agnes, Anathema’s view of the timeline isn’t exactly… linear. She knows things before they happen even if their significance eludes her. A stray image will set off a chain reaction that even she can’t follow and then she’s remembering a house that collapsed in 1963 and just like that she’s solved another prophecy.

Then, not all the time but often enough, an instant will teeter on the edge of three outcomes at once, all looping and cascading around each other. Eventually down the line it won’t really matter what happens next as all these bumps and variations just get folded into Reality and then simply The Past. But here and now it all comes back to what will connect to the Book, and with all those possibilities it takes her a moment to catch up to the moment. It gives her speech a lovely stumbling cadence, almost musical in its irregularity.

The end of the world comes in much the same way: in fits and starts with bits of paper fluttering down from the sky unbidden.

Even if Anathema can’t do anything to stop the end of the world, even if she fails, she has to be there, she has to bear witness. _Ye shall be there also_, the prophecy said, and maybe that’s all that’s expected of her – be there for a witchfinder to find, and then follow in his wake while he saves the world – or possibly while he breaks it? Some of these lines are unclear, and there’s no hint to what happens next. But she is not the first of her line to see these scenes, so for Agnes’s sake she does not close her eyes.


End file.
